"...die wolken still/sprachlos die winde."
"vom sprechen, das nicht aus einem mund kommt."
"politics of affection and uneasiness" |
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Politics of Affection and Uneasiness
Bojana Kunst
vortrag gehalten am 5.06.2004 in hamburg auf kampnagel, anlässlich der produktion "mauser" von heiner müller, in der regie von claudia bosse, eine kooperation von theatercombinat, nationaltheater montenegro und kampnagel hamburg
I.
“History is not given, it has to be constructed”, is one of the sentences introducing the EAST ART MAP. Such is the name of the last project of the Slovenian art collective Irwin, which is existing from 1983 on and is a part of renowned collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). After twenty years of intense contacts and collaboration with Eastern europian artists (with the notion Eastern Europe I’m reffering here exclusively to the ex-communist Europian states) Irwin invited 20 selectors from the East to present the important modernist authors in their countries. After one year of work a parralel artistic, cultural and political map begin slowly to emerge, which is revealing rich history of artistic works, conceptual projects, performance art projects, instalations etc., a history with many territorial and political subdivisions and contacts, a history which was with some exceptions almost totaly invisible on the West. The project is clearly reflecting on the contextualisation and institutionalisation of Western modernism, on the visibility and unvisibility it produces and on hegemonic powers which are defining the history of modernism. Irwin is aware that their position is very ambivalent, that they themselves are behaving as a hegemonic power when constructing the map of Eastern art. But at the same time they are revealing how this strategy can be also one of the ways to create one’s own history, fight for the right for representation and shift the relation between the dominant and the dominated culture. It is essential to build the history of Eastern modernism, because there never was a proper one, with no such institutionalisation there is namely no visibility. EAST ART MAP is deeply emerged in its own ambivalency - it can be read as real and fictional at the same time and as a result showing the in-between position of any history of art.
We can find a parallel theoretical perspective in Boris Groys essay Musealization of the East. Boris Groys lucidly detects a basic problem in the attitude towards the visual art of the European East (with this notion, we are exclusively refering to the ex-communist states). He claims that it is not an excessive exoticness of Eastern art that would cause its not being musealized in the West; things perceived as foreign and exotic at first sight can still be successfully included into the Western museum. The reason why it can not be understood as art lies in a formal kinship between Eastern “non-art” and Western “art”, in their formal and aesthetic closeness. A decisive difference, however, is that of the use of art, not that of form and aesthetic style. If Groys' finding is employed to performing arts, we are immediately faced with many interesting questions. Despite the existence of the belief in a basic aesthetic difference which should characterize the art of the European East, it also holds for performing arts that, from the formal and aesthetic perspective, its interventions are homogenous in a way. A decisive difference can be find in the way how performance works are produced, connected to the broader contexts, institutionalised, how they could develop their presenting strategies in the given political and socio-cultural moment, how they can develope their parallel speach and discourses, how can they embbed themselves in the present time.
Trying to detect an actual difference, we should not look for it in aesthetic and formal procedures. What we should point out is a radical cut in the politics of performing. In this text, the politics of performing is understood as the way of ‘use’ of performing arts: how the performing arts are developing their representational strategies. In the West, performing arts have understood performance politics primarily as an intervention into representation itself, and filled it with a basic mistrust which wholly shatters the ontology of the theatrical event. In the East, however, this politics has taken an entirely different course. Every performance politics was only established in relation to the total model of socialist society, which self-performed itself constantly as the most authentic and at the same time, the most utopian of them all. Thus, in the moment when a single legitimate and all-encompassing representation has been established, any attempt of a different performance politics is not only reduced to an oppositional ideological function, but collapses into itself. The only gesture that seemed to be able to work in the East was that of radical authenticity, which participated in similar aesthetic and formal procedures as those of Western theatre. It was precisely the impossible belief into authenticity that stunned the westerner’s searching gaze the most. Not because the history of Western theatre would not be familiar with such authentic gestures, but because this belief participated in the same aesthetic and formal procedures with which ‘non-authentic’ performance politics is established.
In the East, this kind of situation led to a basic unflexibility of the theatre event; subversive and radical as it may have been (such as that of e.g. experimental and oppositional groups in the sixties and seventies), it could never fully develop its performance politics – in other words, confront the emptiness of representation and a priori beliefs into a certain ideology of the theatrical event. If we generalize a little, this is the very reason why, even a decade later, performances of former communist states are not exotic, strange or incomprehensible - but, in many cases, amateurish and already seen. It seems to naively disclose and repeat the very framework of the aesthetic and formal procedures, which in the West, already has its discoursive body. Here, however, they are settled in the pathetic body of the easterner, who still obsessively repeats his own authentic gesture and, in addition, participates in our most privileged closeness.
It is this feeling that mainly overcame Western producers who sought for fresh creations in the East, during all the decade of the ninethies, despairing time and time again over the scarceness of food on the menu that they could offer their audiences hungry for new things. Of course, exceptions could be found, but were either presented at the artistic market as devoid of identity, or their exceptional status led to their being understood as individual cases of “overcoming the difference”, which frequently acquired nearly romantic heroic dimensions. The disappointment of the producers was all the worse because they humanistically believed into a “quick bridging over the aesthetic differences”. In turn, they found themselves facing the worst of scenarios: there was actually nothing to bridge over, nothing exotic that could be confronted, nothing that could acquire an interpretational frame and be established within festival or production contexts – there were no production discoveries in the right sense of the word. Performances were aesthetically so similar to Western ones that it is not really unusual that not only the majority of these works, but the entire cultural territory of the East Europe seemed like a big all-encompassing déjà vu - a repetition in time, with the past performed in such a way that it unexpectedly hits us as pure present.
This could be also described as the uneasiness that a spectator feels in a very bad moment of a theatre performance (and is well-known to every one of us). This intriguing feeling is of course a consequence of the event passing the sensitive point when constant tension between representation procedures and the authentic gesture is no longer possible, causing the event to fall into banal transparency. The confrontation with the ‘already seen’ fails to dislocate and enable a recognition, but awkwardly reveals the naked reality of the procedures employed by a certain politics of performing; we can say that the most banal authenticity has come to the surface from under the elaborate theatrical disguise. Why is this feeling interesting to me at this point? Because uneassines is not only a consequence of cultural uneasiness, but an essential part of political uneasiness that overcame both sides after the first transition period and their first enthusiasm over one another, which is very accurately described by Slavoj _i_ek: »The disappointment was mutual: the West, which began by idiolizing the Eastern dissident movement as the reinvention of its own tired democracy, disappointedly dismisses the present post-socialist regimes as a mixture of corrupt excommunist oligarchy and/or ethnic and religious fundamentalists. (...) The East, which began by idiolizing the West as the model of affluent democracy, finds itself in the whirlpool of ruthless commercialisation and economic colonisation.« It is about nothing else as the politics of affection and uneasiness, in which the same procedures and madness of both sides is revealed. In a certain moment, both the West and the East somehow performed themselves to each other as political futures, to soon meet in mutual disappointment. The interesting part of this political theatre is that it so directly and banally reveals the function of the spectator. When the event falls over its sensitive border, the spectator is disgraced precisely because he has been so banally and directly revealed: he sees something for which he is aware that he should not see in order to be established as a spectator in the first place. We can thus say that, in the political field of the meeting of the Europian East and the West, the contemporary void and problematic nature of democratic ideals and procedures was revealed. At a certain point, the procedure that established both partners as spectators, revealed their brutal (corruptive or economic) nature, a drained violent gesture, which suddenly revealed itself from under its many disguises.
The dimension of political uneasiness can help us understand how, in the cultural meetings of the European East and West, the recognition of this aesthetic kinship can hold a mirror to both sides. This madness can be even more accurately detected by means of another notion connected with the feeling of uneasiness and the already seen in many ways. It is too banal to be considered in the artistic scope, and yet it is used by all of us somehow: we very frequently say (if not feel - which makes the whole thing even more bizarre), that something is old-fashioned. Old-fashionedness is namely a word, which is not a consequence of the reaction to the East or other cultural environments, which, as a rule, are believed to be located on the margin of some central (in-the-time) zone. At the time of the decrease of alien cultural environments (and the parallel increase of akin ones), it is this banal term that is becoming the main bizarre feeling, that omnipresent attitude towards one’s own centralized locality and the consequently marginal locality of another, as if in all of the contemporary homogeneity of space, only this bizarre time difference, this sly chronological privilege, remains to advocate.
Labelled as “old-fashioned” can only be something that is similar to if not nearly the same as ourselves, and yet, dislocated to such (or sufficient) degree that we can understand and accept it with an affection which produces a basic uneasiness at the same time. We can naturally say that this notion is a reflection of cultural hegemony, in which we do not acknowledge a present position of another: we literally claim the notion of contemporarity as exclusively our own. This hegemonic position works precisely as discussed by André Lepecki in an article on the genealogy of the perception of Portuguese dance in Europe: »synchronicity is here the exclusive matter of western dramaturgy and chronology matter of geography« . Anyway with the recognizing of the hegemonic background of the notion of old-fashionedness, and emphasis the difference instead, we still have not said anything yet. We will thus favour the difference and the different; but in that case, our position will have to deal with the dilemma of multicultural position for which it has turned out that it always becomes very uneasy when practically confronted with a different authentic gesture. It has inevitably failed at all occasions, fixating the difference even more. We can say that the multiculturalistic attitude cannot go beyond its ‘aesthetic’ favouring: the other can always be visible (represented), but not in his madness.
But no matter how much it may seem to refer to aesthetic procedures, the notion of old-fashionedness primarily relates to the issue of politics - or the ways of producing, representing and structuring a certain politics of performing, to the ways how the power of visibility operates. It belongs to the sphere which Groys defines as that of ‘use’. It is a symptom of privileging and constituting certain contemporarities over others; this not only holds for co-existing cultural environments, but can also be observed in more local variants. It tells us that akin politics of performing are generated parallel to each other, which refer to and get to know one another precisely through this impossible but always present deviation in time: this is the main institutional and structural criterion with which something in performing arts will be launched to the market, presented at festivals, and co-produced; last but not least, this criterion also determines important things as subventions, state support, the shaping of cultural politics etc. It tells us about how the attitude to something akin, but other than ourselves (in this case, the East) is always a question of certain politics which chooses when and in what way a certain field will (not) be visible, within what kind of context it will be performed, who will be the presentor and who the represented. This kind of visibility regulation is extremely important because it is only the one who is visible that can develop the whole structure with a very clear dividing line between the present and the past. Even more important, however, is the fact that this notion reveals the genesis of the uneasy feeling of the spectator, which is actually present on both sides. Both, in this case East and the West are banally disclosed in the function that should not be seen in order for their meeting to take place at all.
The uneasiness appears precisely because the meeting of the East and the West is very rarely used as a tactical advantage (and this counts for both sides). The tactical advantage does not participate in this institutionalization of contemporarity with the exhausting search of aesthetic similarities. Such search namely frequently submits the entire field of performing arts to commercial and market spectacle, in which actually everyone is framed and interpreted within a certain context. To put it differently, every deviation from the in-the-time centre seems disabled in advance; the essence of contemporary cultural politics is that the centre knows very well where the guerrilla is the entire time. This situation dangerously conceals the enforcement of much more important and penetrative strategies, which develop their minor, tactical politics of performing. This situation isn’t only excluding small emotional interventions, subversive strategies, alternative ways of production and distribution, but also whole histories, with no acces to representation (like russian theatre from the eigthies, slovenian theatrical practices from the eigthies which were highly developed but of course not participating in spectacular present of the then market).
But let’s return again to the déjà vu affect and try to observe what is really the essence of the position of ‘already seen’. In the case of déjà vu, the moment will be put to a traumatic halt for its surprise, and fill us with strong uneasiness. In a single moment, our coherent chronology, along with the related territories and borders, will be shattered. In the case of a true déjà vu, the traumatic confrontation with the ‘already seen’ deeply interferes with our perception of reality, which suddenly proves to be artificial, and us dislocated in its scope. It deeply shatters our perception of identity and location, and encroaches upon our privilege of the present. So what do we really get with déjà vu is not very powerfull position, not a position of the powerfull present but excatly the opposite: déjà vu reveals our weak side, it dislocates us and take away our privileges.
This awarennes is even more important today, a decade or more after the democratisation amd discovery of the East, when with the Europian enlargement the present time of joining countries is becoming maybe more visibile, but now there are even more unvisible parts of Europe staying outside and with no visible future at all. In our present situation, after both sides were revealed to each other through already seen, we are confronted with the severe problems of contemporary representative democracy, with borders which are becoming more and more transparent and controlled, with redistribution of power which is increasingly linked to the economical and globalised procedures. With the global cultural market there is a feeling at work that we can participate more in the cultural spectacle, but what is really at stake is that there is an even narrower territory for art to act as an alternative knowledge producer and radical agency.
What if we explicitly have to admit that with our meetings there is also a failure at work? Can we deal and reveal this failure and at the same time not play the game of power and dominance? What if this failure has something to do with the necessary limits of our present time, the borders of our potentiality to turn something around? Maybe we can be open for different possibilies excatly with experiencing this dislocated weakness, an uneasy affection where our present time reveals itself also as constructed and artificial. That’s of course something completely opposite to the fruitless understanding of this meeting as that of the hegemonic and developed producing West and the helpless and chaotic East, where every successful contact can only go in the direction of some aesthetic ‘evolution’ – in short, into a futile search of some kinship for which we have established that it has always been there in the first place. Getting to know each other, both partners discover their weakness. If they are able to admitt it, then some productive strategies af cooperation are being possible. Both parties have responsibility to share this common utopian moment and also to offer it to the others. What I have in mind is different politics, paths and also emotions and personal interventions, which are not interested in the privilege of time, but primarily in that of action. In this privilege, both sides can identify themselves and realize that their manoeuvres can only be put into practice by means of a basic loss. This common utopian matching, which is primarily the domain of politics and not that of aesthetics, seems to be the first prerequisite for visibility. Without it, every territory (be it political, spatial, artistic, or intimate) will be lost in the stylistic and uneasy crack in time: old-fashionedness – the privilege of contemporarity, which lets us keep nothing and makes every future even more fabricated. |